Let’s talk about SEO, and how it has grown into a strategic marketing trend that is helping business owners in almost every industry. Although all companies want a first-page rank on Google’s search results, modern SEO is a highly technical process. Still, it can be a profitable strategy for most companies, especially those who stay up to date with the latest trends. We’ve compiled a list of SEO techniques that will continue to be effective through 2015.

Use Competitive Insights to Attract Your Audience

Competitor analysis is a key component in any effective SEO strategy. Just like it sounds, this involves assessing what your company’s competitors are doing to improve organic ranks and attract visitors.

One of the main factors in earning high ranks on Google is having links to your website from authoritative sources. With a trusted SEO company, is easy to see which websites are linking to your competitors’ pages. You can then try to obtain links to your page from these sites by reaching out to them directly. Sometimes, all you have to do is offer to publish a guest blog post.

Here are other questions you can ask when analyzing your competitors:

How fast is their site loading?

How have they organized their sitemap?

How many links are going to their website? From how many domains?

What keywords are they targeting?

What types of media are they using to generate traffic?

Ultimately, your goal is to learn why your competitors are successful. You can use that information to develop an SEO strategy to outperform them.

Align SEO and Content Teams

Your entire SEO campaign should revolve around the experience of your target audience, which is why useful content is essential for SEO. There are several types of media under the umbrella of “content marketing” including blog posts, web content, videos, infographics, and podcasts. Using these media to enhance your visitor experience—more specifically, to solve their problems—is a critical part of earning organic ranks.

Your company does not necessarily need to use every type of media to attract visitors. While using each kind of media will bring variety and novelty to your site, learning which media types appeal to your audience specifically is beneficial. By using only certain kinds of media, you can help save a lot of money, and better serve your audience and their interests.

Prioritize Mobile SEO

If you don’t have a mobile strategy, you don’t have a future strategy. Although this statement might be a little dramatic, it has never been truer than in 2015, the year in which tech giants predict an increasing number of companies will learn how to mobilize their revenue-generating processes, like making purchases and depositing checks. People spend more time on mobile devices than on any other platform, and a mobile marketing strategy should be a priority for SEO. In 2015, all websites that hope to rank well in organic results must be mobile compatible. Otherwise, they are losing out on a lot of potential traffic. Also, it is likely that their bounce rate will increase, which could adversely affect their Google page-rank.

Conversions

Some SEO firms may tell you conversions are old news, and not as important as page views or bounce rate, they would be wrong. Conversions are the most valuable metric in SEO. When a visitor comes to your website and does what you want them to do, that’s a conversion. If you run an ecommerce site, the moment a visitor buys something that’s a conversion. For a hotel it would be the moment a visitor makes an online reservation. If you run a website for a law firm a conversion wouldn’t be an online sale, but might rather be getting a visitor to fill out an online form requesting more information. If you’re an architect it might be getting a visitor to your website to pick up the phone and call the number they found on your site. Conversions are a much more precious metric than rankings, backlinks, and traffic, and your website should be designed in such a way as to encourage conversions. After all, the entire purpose of SEO is to create leads for your business.

Contact us at KaJ Labs for more tips on how to improve your business’s SEO strategy!